Related papers: Contact-mediated cellular communication supplement…
Cellular behavior is governed by gene regulatory processes that are intrinsically dynamic and nonlinear, and are subject to non-negligible amounts of random fluctuations. Such conditions are ubiquitous in physical systems, where they have…
Among the main actors of organism development there are morphogens, which are signaling molecules diffusing in the developing organism and acting on cells to produce local responses. Growth is thus determined by the distribution of such…
The ability of a cell to communicate with its environment is essential for key cellular functions like replication, metabolism, or cell fate decisions. The involved molecular mechanisms are highly dynamic and difficult to capture…
The biological processes of cellular decision making and differentiation involve a plethora of signalling pathways and gene regulatory circuits. These networks, in their turn, exhibit a multitude of motifs playing crucial parts in…
From flocking birds to schooling fish, organisms interact to form collective dynamics across the natural world. Self-organization is present at smaller scales as well: cells interact and move during development to produce patterns in fish…
We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
There is growing appreciation that gene function is connected to the dynamic structure of the chromosome. Here we explore the interplay between three-dimensional structure and transcriptional activity at the single cell level. We show that…
The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living…
The fundamental processes of biological development are governed by multiple signaling molecules that create non-uniform concentration profiles known as morphogen gradients. It is widely believed that the establishment of morphogen…
Collective cell migration plays a central role in tissue development, morphogenesis, wound repair and cancer progression. With the growing realization that physical forces mediate cell motility in development and physiology, a key…
Living cells can leverage correlations in environmental fluctuations to predict the future environment and mount a response ahead of time. To this end, cells need to encode the past signal into the output of the intracellular network from…
This paper proposes a control theoretic framework to model and analyze the self-organized pattern formation of molecular concentrations in biomolecular communication networks, emerging applications in synthetic biology. In biomolecular…
Self-organization is a fundamental process of complex biological systems, particularly during the early stages of development. In the mammalian embryo, blastocyst formation exemplifies a self-organized system, involving the correct…
Emergent communication offers insight into how agents develop shared structured representations, yet most research assumes homogeneous modalities or aligned representational spaces, overlooking the perceptual heterogeneity of real-world…
Living cells respond to spatial signals. Signal transmission to the cell interior often involves the release of second messengers like $Ca^{2+}$ . They will eventually trigger a physiological response by activating kinases that in turn…
The positioning of new cellular walls during cell division plays a key role in shaping plant tissue organization. The influence of cell geometry on the positioning of division planes has been previously captured into various geometrical…
Spatial patterns in the early fruit fly embryo emerge from a network of interactions among transcription factors, the gap genes, driven by maternal inputs. Such networks can exhibit many qualitatively different behaviors, separated by…
Cell-cell communication is often achieved by secreted signaling molecules that bind membrane-bound receptors. A common class of such receptors are G-protein coupled receptors, where extracellular binding induces changes on the membrane…
The importance of individual cells in a developing multicellular organism is well known but precisely how the individual cellular characteristics of those cells collectively drive the emergence of robust, homeostatic structures is less well…